MATANG MUNI- SHARIR PURN HO GAYE WITH ALL FREE RADICALS
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JANGAL ME MANGAL
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DTH- SHARIR PURA HO GAYA
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Think about anything often enough, from enough angles, and it’s bound to splinter and refract. Our minds are like kaleidoscopes, packed with mirrors we twist to see the world anew. Sometimes we’re twisting consciously, sometimes unconsciously. But no matter what, we end up seeing patterns that are more a product of the tool in hand than of the world on its other end. Stevens’s poem, on this reading, is less about blackbirds than about the lenses we use to spy on them. It’s a warning, in other words, not to mistake the kaleidoscope for the universe.
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And though he’s no poet (as far as I know), House is a pleasure to read. Like Oliver Sacks and like Robert Sapolsky, who advised him at Stanford, House distills the details of psychiatry and neurology into digestible forms. Near the beginning, brains “carry with them, in their assumptions and lessons, statistics about the world they act in.” And towards the end: “Information in computers is stored as limits on the possibilities of where electrons can go.” Drawing from science fiction and scientific journals, from historical episodes and his own experience, House paints a picture of a field that is at once chaotic and controlled. “Neuroscience is a frustrating field to be in,” he admits early on, not least because it feels like it gets ever farther from fulfilling its aims.
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Hadot’s view of philosophy as a way of life was unusual, but his erudition concerning the ancient Greek schools was undeniable. In France, Michel Foucault was very taken with the idea of spiritual exercises, which he integrated into his own writings as technologies of the self. How have we come to be the kinds of individuals we are? How do formal and informal practices — from schools to prisons to therapies and medication — create and limit our options? For Foucault, the essential question was “Can we live otherwise?” Can we find ways of being that are different from the ones that contemporary regimes of selfhood have defined for us as natural, healthy and acceptable?
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FORENSICALLY INTELLIGENT
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Pigliucci doesn’t want his readers to be puzzled. He wants us to realize that becoming conscious of our own faults and practicing to reduce them will make us “better human beings.” By “better” he simply means more attentive to others, more kind, more generous and less prone to do the wrong thing because of bad people around us. The Stoic advice: Accept the things we must, improve what we can.
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Still, a few texts are conspicuous in their absence. We can forgive him “Thirteen Ways,” as the editor of Nineteen Ways failed to mention Stevens, too. But what of Thomas Nagel, whose classic essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” set the parameters of House’s search? It’s true that a number of neuroscientists and their readers have contested Nagel’s claim that there is something it is like to be a bat, and that this subjective dimension of consciousness is inaccessible to objective study. One can imagine why practitioners dedicated to just such studies might object to such prima facie limits.
But House adopts Nagel’s perspective, albeit without naming him. “The one and only thing we know for certain for every one of us,” House writes early on, is that “there is something that it is like to be us.” And for both men, that “something” remains just beyond the grasp of anyone but the person experiencing it. Subjective knowledge of me never evolves into objective knowledge of you. Try as we might, “we can only ever scratch the surface of what really goes on inside” others. While this view leads Nagel to pessimism, House holds out hope that if we just keep scratching, we’ll bridge the divide and explain what it is like to be a bat — or any other conscious being.
Doing so would mean solving what David Chalmers in 1995 famously dubbed “the hard problem of consciousness.” While explaining mental functions in physical terms was “easy,” the “hard” problem was explaining why they were accompanied by the experience of performing them. As with Nagel’s point, House seems to accept Chalmers’s — before concluding that consciousness is “Not That Hard” after all. Why the optimism? To be honest, it’s hard to tell. At times, his 19 ways click into place like an ingenious kaleidoscope; at others, they come apart in your hands, as if the only thing holding them together was House’s decision to dedicate a chapter to each.
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Instead, over 6 million of us have died of COVID as per official counts, with some estimates putting the true count at 12-22 million
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NATURE X NURTURE
Scientists have found that low activity of the monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A) gene is linked to aggressive behavior and violent offenses—but in case we are tempted to “go back to God’s drawing board and design better Sapiens” (as Harari says we can), not everyone with low MAO-A activity is violent, nor is everyone with high MAO-A activity nonviolent. People who grow up in extremely abusive environments often become aggressive or violent, no matter what their genes. Having high MAO-A activity can protect you from this fate, but it is not a given. On the contrary, when children are raised in loving and supportive environments, even those with low MAO-A activity very often thrive.
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Take taste. Reading someone like Harari, one might think that the behavior of newborn human babies, for example, is almost exclusively dominated by their genes, since babies have almost no “nurture” to speak of. But research shows that the six-month-old babies of women who drank a lot of carrot juice in the last trimester of their pregnancy enjoyed carrot-flavored cereal more than other babies did. These babies like the flavor of carrots but not because of “carrot-liking” genes. When mothers (biological or foster) breastfeed their babies, tastes of the foods they have eaten are reflected in their breast milk, and their babies develop a preference for these foods. Babies “inherit” food preferences from the behavior of their mothers.
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| Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, No escape from reality Open your eyes, Look up to the skies and see.... |
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